


Open

by DwarvenBeardSpores



Series: twisty twink falls for stone butch coffin [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: (sort of), Body Horror, Canon-typical discussions of skin, Horror, Identity Issues, Introspection, Monsters, One-sided Conversation, Other, Season 3, Tenderness, The Circus - Freeform, body issues, non-euclidian spaces
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-22
Updated: 2020-01-22
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:21:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22357855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DwarvenBeardSpores/pseuds/DwarvenBeardSpores
Summary: Michael liked Too-Close-I-Cannot-Breathe. Well, if it could like anything. The thing through the Casket was a collapsed labyrinth, wreck and rubble of a ruined maze. Or perhaps one that hadn’t been carved yet. Either way. Someone could get lost down there.Michael ducked behind and around the Casket, through space that did and did not contain a passage down. One long finger scratched along the wood, scarring it with fractals that drifted across other, older scars.Something under the wood scratched back.-In which Michael has a talk with the Coffin.
Relationships: The Coffin (The Magnus Archives) & Michael (The Magnus Archives), The Coffin (The Magnus Archives)/Michael (The Magnus Archives)
Series: twisty twink falls for stone butch coffin [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1625002
Comments: 20
Kudos: 112





	Open

**Author's Note:**

> This came out of several discussions with my partner, Felix, about the avatars. One about how there are so few Spiral avatars because Michael and Helen are a special case because they ARE the Spiral, and another about how Jonny will not write the sexy buried avatar of my dreams... and could that be because the Coffin is also serving as a special case avatar? And could MichaelHelenDistortion and the Coffin be friends? Or perhaps... lovers?? 
> 
> Anyway this was an ABSOLUTE delight to write even though Michael kept making me go off in unexpected directions and write things out of order, which, really, I should have expected. Also I genuinely really care about this pairing now. 
> 
> Disclaimer: _I_ know the difference between caskets and coffins. Michael doesn’t WANT to know. Also, I’m pretty sure Michael the only one who has ever used the name “the Cramped Casket” which is what I'm going off of and is adorable tbh. 
> 
> Any inconsistencies within the fic or between the fic and the series are because the Twisting Deceit is a LIAR. Who woulda guessed? 
> 
> CONTENT NOTE: this fic deals with themes and images relating to the Spiral, the Buried, and the Stranger, as well as discomfort with having a body. While it’s fairly casual about all of them, tread with appropriate caution.

The Cramped Casket was easy to find, because it was a door. 

Not a very good door. Oh, yes, it had hinges, it lured you inside, but it was uninviting and solid, and one-way only. Stepping through that door would suck you deep into the hard heart of Too-Close-I-Cannot-Breathe. It was the click of a basement lock as you realized the woman in the kitchen intended you to waste away. It was the hissing slam of an automatic fail-safe in a facility only just beginning to come crashing down. Which really, made it a very good door after all. 

It was traveling with the Circus now. Well, it was traveling with the deliverymen, who were traveling with the Circus, who—as it seemed—were traveling with the Archivist. Michael approved of the deliverymen. Two wanderers without a map, circling back over themselves as they delivered things for an end they could never understand. Had things been slightly different, they could have been serving the Twisting Deceit. But Michael didn’t want to talk to them. 

When Breekon and Hope fell through two identical trapdoors, they found themselves in a maze, on different sides of a wall, so close but so distant. Michael felt their pain of separation like a sharp piece of taffy in its gut. (It wasn’t supposed to have a gut.) Oh, and they were _lost_ , lost without their Package, lost without their purpose. They were so old now they’d be nearly impossible to digest, but Michael could let them wander for a while. 

“Ah, finally,” Michael said. “We’re alone.” 

The Casket, propped up between half-finished waxworks draped in glitter and stray skin, looked both out of place and as though it had never been anywhere else. 

Michael liked Too-Close-I-Cannot-Breathe. Well, if it could like anything. The thing through the Casket was a collapsed labyrinth, wreck and rubble of a ruined maze. Or perhaps one that hadn’t been carved yet. Either way. Someone could get lost down there. 

Michael ducked behind and around the Casket, through space that did and did not contain a passage down. One long finger scratched along the wood, scarring it with fractals that drifted across other, older scars. 

Something under the wood scratched back. 

Michael grinned. 

“Hello to you, too, Casket,” it said, not stopping its circling. Like a seductress, or a curious crab. “It has been a while, hasn’t it?” Michael laughed, because there was no reason for it to want to see the Casket, and that was just the reasoning Michael preferred. The laugh echoed off the corners of the room until it hit the coffin and was swallowed into the wood. 

“What a surprise to see you with the Circus. I’m almost hurt.” 

The Worker-of-Clay had been fond of the force behind the Casket. Not as fond as he had been of It-Is-Not-What-It-Is, of course, but he had said things like “if it looks solid, immutable, people will think it is and always has been. But the ground beneath us is moving all the time.” He had smiled. The Twisting had heard him and been in him and ignored him, because those details could not possibly matter when it was so close to _arriving_. 

The scratching continued, like something wanted to be let out. The coffin lied. 

“ _Do not open_ ,” Michael read, tapping a finger on the words written on the Casket’s lid. “You know, that’s the thing I like about labels. People want so much to believe them, no matter what they say. There’s something to be done, there. Someone to be taken. Don’t you think so?” 

The Casket moaned, something low and muffled. Almost singing. Almost complaining. 

“He _didn’t,”_ Michael said. “Every time, and with _ice?_ " It shook its head. “That sounds like more than a labeling problem.” 

The Casket continued to moan. 

“Perhaps,” Michael said. It was loathe to make promises. “If I feel like it.” It sighed. It bent its neck back along its spine. “I'm actually hunting something else.” 

Now, the Casket listened. 

“Have you met the new Archivist?” Michael asked. “Terrible, isn’t he? Yes. Do you suppose I should kill him?” 

Michael remembered dirty bits of paper that told stories that never quite added up. He remembered learning, as Michael, how his Archivist had defeated the Sunken Sky, and what methods she had used. He was afraid of it, the Choke, (the Archivist), but his fear had been wrung dry over his own anger and tossed in a corner of his corridors where even now it was being twisted into something else. 

“I’d rather that than let the Circus use him,” Michael said. “Their masks of skin tire me.” 

The coffin gave its answer. 

“I,” Michael said, and then again, because it had sounded wrong that time, because the syllable, the _identity,_ had caught on Michael’s teeth, “ _I_ don't like you.” It slumped over the side of the coffin, arms pooling like liquids. “All those straight lines. Even edges. Would even I go flat inside of you, I wonder? Crushed down by all that pressure?” 

The moaning stopped. The scratching resumed. 

“Or would _I_ would warp _you?_ Take out all that ‘structural integrity’? That’s what the man from the sky did, I’ve heard. The wrong meal at the wrong time, and everything just... falls.” Michael laughed. Splayed its hands open to demonstrate the collapse. Its fingers curled downward, tangling over themselves, but they remained fingers. 

Michael’s skin felt so heavy. 

It pressed its face to the wood, not close enough to warp through, but close enough to feel. The Casket was rough and smelled of what it was. Dust and dirt caked in since the beginning of coffins, or before. It shook with the force of its voice. 

“What _are_ you doing here?” Michael said softly. “Hauled around like luggage, propped in this ghastly place? You’re more than just a door, aren’t you? More than a prop for the Circus to keep hidden. Could it be that you-” and the idea held such humor that Michael almost couldn’t finish the sentence for laughing, “that you, the Choke itself, have gotten yourself stuck?” 

Michael’s laughter tumbled out and around the Casket, discordant with the singing, looping up through Michael’s legs and back out its throat until Michael thought it might never stop. The brick walls around Breekon and Hope shivered like gelatin and, somewhere deep in halls and veins, they screamed. 

The Casket was a shovel hidden deep in the ground that one had to dig for if they wanted to dig. It was the act of being on the outside of a caved-in cave. The door said _Do Not Open_ underneath all the chains. Michael’s fingers played, now, along the seams, but no one had opened that lid in far too long. The Casket was defeating itself. 

“ _I_ won’t help you, you know. I could. I could send these foolish deliverymen in circles until they came apart. I could throw you down into yourself until you choke on your own wood and in doing so become complete." 

The Casket went silent. 

“But I won’t.” 

Not even Michael would have wanted to help, not once in the many, _many_ things he felt. The Cramped Casket didn’t deserve his “compassion” and it wouldn’t soothe his “anger” but keeping it here, around, to talk to, might almost help soothe the itch under his skin. Under Michael’s skin. _This_ skin, that was too heavy and too sticky for even the Circus to peel. 

(Michael did not want his skin to go to the Circus, even if it could. He held one new grudge now against I-Do-Not-Know-You. Michael did not want to lie down beneath their blades and let them try to skin it. Weapons warped in its presence. It disliked the Circus’s plans. And it was stronger than them, by far.) 

(The only thing worse than being a _self_ would be seeing that _self_ torn away and worn by another, and worse than that would be both at once, seeing your _self_ in front of you and _still being someone_ despite it.) 

“Could _you_ free us, if you cared to?” Michael pressed the palm of its hand to the Casket and bent its fingers back along its arm. Beneath its touch, the scratching started up again. “Would you rub me raw of myself, shred the idea of legs and arms and a face and let the Twisting go free?” 

The Casket scratched. 

Breekon and Hope tromped, side-by-side and separate, up and down hallways on the inside of Michael’s throat. 

Michael could not be still. It could not be _this._ It pushed off the coffin and began walking the room again, curling around, dragging its fingers through the mannequins and slicing, toppling them. Their not-faces twisted. 

Somewhere in the museum, a being of the Circus, made of wax and skin and things that were neither wax nor skin but wanted to be, opened a door and descended a staircase. It was coming for the Casket, and Michael did not want to be found. 

Traces of the room started clinging to Michael’s heels as it circled. Each step warped the floorboards, tugged the tinsel, and then set everything spiraling off to the corners of the room, to bounce back like the lights of a screensaver. Michael opened a door and stepped through, pulling the room into a chamber of and within the Twisting Deceit. If it existed anywhere (which it didn’t), this hallway would be somewhere to the left of Michael’s sternum. 

Michael felt better like this, encased in its own corridors, a drop of water in water. 

“Welcome,” Michael said, and laughed, bowing low. “Or, unwelcome, as you may be. You do insist on being _real_ in the face of everything that is not.” 

Throughout all that, the Casket remained still, edges rigid, core solid and dense and immobile. It did not even bother to spin. It hurt like a stone sewn into a heart. 

“I don’t want you here,” said Michael, who had brought the space to the coffin and could not even bear to regret it. “ 

Somewhere in the hallways, Breekon sensed the coffin and said “Oi, this way!” and Hope said, “which way?” and, blindly, they began trudging closer, down the tunnels inside Michael’s shoulder blades. 

This time when the Coffin moaned, it was very clearly critical. 

“Worse than the mannequins?” Michael said. 

The moaning continued. The Coffin did not shake but it gave off the appearance of a tremor. 

“I thought not. That’s the thing about the Stranger. They try so hard and they just never seem to get it right.” Michael did not need to laugh. The walls of the room laughed for him. 

For. It. For Michael. 

(Michael Shelley had been afraid.) 

The walls laughed and this time Michael was not laughing with them. Something was lodged in its throat. It felt as still as the Casket even as the hallways pulsed around it. A drop of oil in water. 

Michael had nearly taken a chunk out of one of the coffin’s corners. Its fingers dug deep into the wood but the coffin resisted being less than what it was. 

“Fine,” Michael said. “If you hate it so much, we’re going back.” 

It opened a door and the coffin fell through and Michael leaped after it. They landed, one atop the other, on the floor of the wax museum’s basement. For a moment, Michael straddled the coffin like a lover. Then it sprawled across the lid, cheek pressed against the _Do Not Open._ Its limbs tumbled in all directions, but they remained limbs. Michael’s hair fell across its face, obscuring the room with curls, but it remained hair. 

Michael ran a finger over one of the coffin’s hinges. 

“I don’t suppose I can blame you,” it mumbled, its voice went down, down, down, even through the wood. “I hate so many more things than I ever thought possible.” 

The scratching this time was long and slow, something dragging nails longways across the coffin, longways along Michael’s weight. 

"You’re right,” Michael said. “I _should_ kill the Archivist.” 

The basement doorknob rattled. Michael lifted a hand. The being made of wax and skin opened the door and disappeared into a spiraling hallway. It turned to run and found only locked doors. Michael swallowed. 

The Casket rumbled. 

“Now, now,” Michael said, voice pulling into a pout. “I don’t _do_ things for convenience.” 

The coffin pulled Michael closer with the sheer force of its being. Wooden patterns imprinted in Michael’s skin like splinters. 

Michael felt so heavy. 

Beneath his chest, the Coffin began to sing. 

Michael closed its eyes and listened. 

“Y’hear that?” said Hope, still lost. “Must be that way,” said Breekon. They paced circles around Michael’s stomach, counting lanterns now. 

“What do you think you’re doing to me?” Michael said. The coffin just kept singing, low and measured. Its voice sat heavy on Michael’s spine. Michael used to like being held. 

Michael was loose bundle of yarn being squeezed tight by a meaty fist. Michael was slime pressed deep inside a whorled seashell. Michael was so much spine. 

“Oh, no,” said Michael. “No, I don’t think so.” 

It pushed with its palms and, with some struggle, rolled off the coffin and onto the floor. The room rolled with it. Michael draped across a few battered mannequins, curled and stretched like an explosion, like a morning glory, like something that could never be contained. 

The Casket’s song had stopped. It sat in the room as solid as a hole. 

Michael’s throat still felt tight. Constricted. Like there was clay in there, or deadbolts. Something solid. Something that was not Breekon and Hope, nor the being from the Circus who was losing skin as it ran from door to door to door, who was so easy to digest. 

Michael tapped tiny doorways into its own knees. 

And then the coffin lid creaked open. 

Not much, just a crack that made the chain rattle. The chain that, in Michael’s presence, had gone a bit looser. A bit more twisted. 

The open door was an action Michael recognized well, and its wrist twitched in recognition. This was an invitation, and a trap, and a lie. Michael liked the lie. 

“You do tempt me,” it said, and that was a lie too, because It-Is-Not-What-It-Is cannot be tempted. “But I will decline.” 

Michael leaned forward, torso stretching halfway across the room, fingers curling around the edge of the lid so it could peer inside. There were stairs, evenly spaced, leading down. There was the scent of something old and dry, laced with tightly coiled wafts of fear. There was a maze, or there had-once-been-and-one-day-would-be a maze. Michael’s hallways contracted, the walls closing in. Breekon and Hope shouted. 

The closer Michael pressed the easier it became to press closer, until Michael’s face was bleeding fractals into the lips of the lid. 

No, there was no room for the Twisting Deceit down there. 

(Michael used to like being held.) 

“That’s not for me,” Michael called into it, and its voice fell and clattered like stones. Its body was so heavy. “I am sorry, Casket, but you’ve got no chance.” 

There was no room not to be. 

Michael did not close doors. It opened them. It liked possibilities. But it pulled its fingers free and pressed the lid back into place. The chains were left as they were, loose and erratically bent. Let the Casket have its fun with the Circus, if it could. 

Michael did not want to be anywhere near the rock that swallowed, could not stand the threat of Too-Close-I-Cannot-Breathe. It leaned backwards, curling its spine gently around the coffin. Pinned to the ceiling was the peeling of someone’s face, stretched and leering and insistently nobody. Michael jerked its chin and the face wrung its features out like an old rag. 

The noise the Casket made this time was almost petulant. 

Michael laughed, and it was a quiet laugh this time, one that skittered off the walls. The Casket’s voice pressed on its ribs. “Of course I won’t throw the Archivist into you,” it said. “But I will come tell you once I’ve killed him. Will that do?” 

The Casket scratched. 

Michael scratched back. 

Fractals bloomed on old wood. 

The room spun lazily, twisting at the corners. Michael, still sprawled over the coffin, did not. The Casket hummed looping patterns deep into his chest and through his lungs and Michael hummed back through a throat that was so heavy.

And then there was a knock. Two knocks, one from Michael’s hip, and then an echoing one from a bit further down its leg, and Michael realized its hallways, too, had been still too long. 

"That would be my cue to leave,” Michael said, standing abruptly. It trailed one last touch along the coffin’s corners, solid and deliberate as ever. “Goodbye, Casket.” 

Two doors opened and Breekon and Hope tumbled out, grunting and already reaching for each other. “It’s still ‘ere,” said Breekon, pointing at the coffin. “Just our luck,” said Hope. 

The Cramped Casket was silent. 

Michael stepped between the deliverymen, opened a third door, and was gone. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! I’d love to hear what you thought :D 
> 
> I can also be found on tumblr as dwarven-beard-spores, twitter as @beardspores, and dreamwidth as dwarvenbeardspores. 
> 
> Fun fact! The song for this fic was, cryptically, “Glitter” by Charly Bliss.
> 
> EDIT: I almost forgot to share, but the alternate summary for this fic is "twisty twink falls for stone butch coffin."


End file.
